by William Boyd
I had some spare days in New York before I embarked, and decided to spend one of them visiting Hamish. I telephoned him and made the arrangements. I caught a train to Princeton and from there took a taxi over to Zion. It took several inquiries before we discovered where the National Research Institute was. We found it eventually, situated in an old school on the outskirts of the small town. It was a pleasant red-brick single-storied building around a grassy quadrangle. I waited in a sort of porter’s lodge until Hamish came to collect me.
He hadn’t changed a great deal. He was even wearing the same clothes I’d last seen him in: gray flannels, stout shoes, a tweed jacket—still pervaded by his musty bachelor smell. I noticed he had some teeth missing. Hamish was not a man overburdened with vanity. His only concession to the warmth and American taste was the absence of a tie. His collar was open, exposing his white throat. We shook hands with some nervousness.
“I thought you’d be in uniform,” he said.
“Well, I’ve got one but I’m not comfortable wearing it, not yet.”
“Same here. I’ve got one too. It seems silly, somehow.”
We chatted a little awkwardly as we walked through the wide quadrangle. On the other side of the building were playing fields and tennis courts, but the courts were now covered by neat rows of new Quonset huts. Power lines looped from the main building. Some of the huts had whitewashed windows. Here and there were incomprehensible signs: NRI/77/DEC. 1/2 55TH.
“We’ve doubled our staff,” Hamish said. “Hence these rabbit hutches.”
“What do you do here?”
“Oh, government stuff. Mainly maths.”
He led me to his hut, which was raised on brick piles on the edge of the football field. On the door it said NRI MAJOR H. MALAHIDE.
“Are you a major?” I asked astonished.
Hamish laughed. “It seems they had to make me one, because of my work. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference; they just pay me more money.”
Inside the hut was an orthodox desk, a couple of old leather armchairs, a sink and a stove. Beyond them were row upon row of automatic electronic calculators. A small bespectacled man was bent over one of them, reading the numbers it had printed out.
“Fancy a dry martini?” Hamish asked. “The most wonderful invention known to man.”
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Not for me, Hamish,” said the little man. “I must be going.” He had a strong mid-European accent.
“By the way,” Hamish said, “this is Kurt.” I shook hands with him. “Kurt, this is John—the friend I was telling you about.”
“My God! My good heavens! John James Todd.” My hand was re-shaken vigorously by Kurt. “I am honored to meet you, Mr. Todd. Truly honored.” He shook hands with delighted incredulity.
He had a high voice. He was very warmly dressed with a thick jersey under his gray suit and had an unwrapped woollen scarf around his neck. His dark hair had dramatic broad streaks of gray and was brushed straight back off his forehead. There was a marked intensity in his gaze: friendly but profoundly curious.
“I never forget that evening in Berlin. Never,” he said. “Nineteen thirty-two. Your film, Die Konfessionen.”
“You saw it?”
“Yes. Three times in one week. Gloria-Palast.… Mr. Todd, I tell you. The most extraordinary film. A work of genius.”
“Thank you very much.”
He tied his scarf and took a tweed overcoat off the back of the door. The sun shone strongly on the green of the playing fields. He buttoned the coat.
“My only regret is I never saw Part II and Part III.”
“They were never made. I started Part II—we had to abandon it.”
“That’s a shame.… But you must finish it, Mr. Todd, you must. It is most extraordinary work. You mustn’t leave it incomplete.” At this he glanced at Hamish and gave an odd, high yelping laugh. Hamish joined in.
“Good one, Kurt,” he said.
Kurt shook my hand for the third time. “I mean it, Mr. Todd. I’ve never seen a movie like it. Finish it. I would be the most terrible waste.” He folded up the collar of his overcoat and turned to Hamish. “It looks fine, Hamish. I think you’re on the right track. Good-bye, Mr. Todd. It has been a most memorable meeting.” He left.
I looked at Hamish. “Who the hell was that?”
“Probably the most brilliant mathematician in the world.”
“Really?… Amazing that he saw The Confessions. What a coincidence.”
Hamish put some ice in his cocktail shaker. “He produced this theorem, the Incompleteness Theorem—that’s why we laughed. It was quite devastating.” He shook the shaker. “Changed the face of mathematics for all time.” He poured out two drinks and looked at me. “In fact I was going to write to you about it, try and explain Kurt’s theorem to you. It’s quite uncanny how it all fits together. Now you’re here, I can tell you about it.”
“Super,” I said.
Hamish handed me a glass.
“Good to see you, John.”
“Cheers.”
That night we had dinner in one of Zion’s better restaurants. I think we ate a kind of pot roast followed by ice cream. I can barely remember eating. Hamish talked constantly, and with the single-minded intensity of all lonely people, of quantum mechanics and its bizarre world of chance and supposition. He mentioned names: Einstein, Bohr, the Copenhagen Statement, de Broglie, thought experiments, Schrödinger’s cat. But he kept coming back to Werner Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle and how everything linked up with Kurt’s Incompleteness Theorem. Absolute truth, he said at one juncture, had been finally exposed as a chimera, an utterly vain ambition. In the sum of human knowledge there would always be crucial uncertainties. And Kurt had shown how even in the most abstract formal systems there would be holes, gaps and inconsistencies that could never be overcome.
Eventually we paid our bill and went outside. I felt stupid, my head stuffed with strange concepts. It was a warm night. I breathed slowly, deeply, as we walked back to the institute.
“Shifting sands, John. Shifting sands.”
“Yes?”
“We live in extraordinary times. They’ll call this the Age of Uncertainty. The Age of Incompleteness.”
“Yes,” I said again, simply.
“Strong stuff, isn’t it?” He paused. “Limits. Limits everywhere.”
“It’s rather depressing, in a way.”
“Why?” He seemed astonished at me. “There may be uncertainties, but don’t you think it’s better to live in the full knowledge of this than go on looking for illusory ‘truths’ that can never exist?”
“Well, yes. I suppose it is, actually.”
“It is, believe me. I find it all invigorating. Great gusts of fresh air. Like standing on top of Paulton Law. Remember?”
“God. Paulton Law.… I haven’t thought about the Academy in years.”
Hamish paused to light a cigarette. The flare of the match cast dark shadows in the rugged, pitted surface of his skin. I felt one of those epiphanic shudders of sadness pass through me—the sort that are meant to signal all manner of potential foreboding. I tried not to think of my future. What would be waiting for me up ahead? I hadn’t a clue.
“The Age of what did you say?” I asked.
“Of Uncertainty. The Age of Uncertainty and Incompleteness.”
“Seems pretty apt, now I come to think of it.”
“It is. Bang on.” He grinned. “That Kurt, he’s a clever old bugger. Set the cat among the pigeons. Remarkable.”
“I thought he seemed very nice.”
“I’m going to do some work on it, when I can find the time.”
“What?”
“Tying up Heisenbergs Uncertainty and Kurt’s Incompleteness.”
“Oh yes?”
“It’s all tremendously exciting.”
“I can see that.”
I blew cool air on my palms. For some reason they were suddenly hot and
sweaty. We walked on in silence for a while.
“You’ll take care, won’t you, John?”
“What do you mean?”
“In Europe. The war. Don’t do anything, you know, foolhardy.”
I laughed. “No bloody fear, Hamish. No bloody fear.”
I left Hamish at Zion the next day. It had been a disquieting visit. We had gone back to his Quonset for a last drink and he went on talking for two more hours about Kurt and Heisenberg, Schrödinger and all that crowd. I felt slightly alarmed also: I was worried that he was becoming obsessed and he wanted me to share his obsession with him. I looked at his rows of calculating machines and asked him what he did with them all. He told me he was still working on prime numbers.
“Very, very big ones,” he said. “Enormous ones.” He thought he had found a way of devising an unbreakable cipher using these vast prime numbers. That explained why he was working for the government and why he had the rank of major.
He tapped out a number on a machine. It printed, “2,146,319,807.”
“That’s the largest prime number known to man,” he said. “I’m trying to find one half as big again.” He waved at the calculators. “With the help of these chaps. Once I’ve found that, I can make the code.”
He spent another hour explaining how the cipher would work, but it was all over my head.
I continued thinking about Kurt and his Incompleteness Theorem and its implications on the train back to New York. I was intrigued that the little man who loved my film had removed the foundations of certainty from the entire world of mathematics. How remarkable too that he had seen my film and how gratifying that it should have affected such an extraordinary man so. I felt a warm glowing surge of self-esteem within me. He was right, as well. The Confessions: Part I was a work of genius. It took one to recognize it. I knew its worth and I owed it to myself and to the world not to let it languish unfinished.
I looked out of the window at the New Jersey swamps. But first there was a war to get through.
17
The Invasion of St.-Tropez
Dateline, St.-Tropez, August 16, 1944. Yesterday, the South of France was invaded by three hundred thousand men from the U.S. and French armies. Operation Dragoon had begun. A vast armada of over twelve hundred vessels, the largest invasion fleet the Mediterranean had ever seen, assembled secretly off the golden beaches of the Riviera. Thousands of parachutists were dropped inland before dawn. Nine hundred fifty-nine aircraft pounded the coastal defenses on an invasion front that stretched from Cavalaire to Fréjus.…
I paused. I thought I had the tone just about right. I imagined it being read in an urgent “March of Time” voice, which I felt was just the sort of voice required. I did not find journalism at all easy.
I was sitting typing on the terrace of a ruined café situated on the quay at St.-Tropez Harbor. The Germans had blown up and largely demolished the port installations and had badly damaged most of the quayside buildings. The rest of the small ancient town was more or less untouched. The big white hotel—the Hôtel Sube et Continental—seemed to pulse with brightness in the midday sun. The old walls and fortifications of the citadel were sharp and distant against the washed-out blue of the sky. I drained the last of my beer, brought to me by the cheerful patron of the demolished café. Yesterday had been a very curious twenty-four hours.
The invasion force—General Patch’s Seventh Army—had been attacking three sectors of the coastline. Alpha Force was assaulting beaches at Cavalaire and St.-Tropez. Delta Force was concentrating on Ste.-Maxime, and Camel Force was divided between Fréjus and St.-Raphaël. I was assigned to a company of the 17th RCT (Regimental Combat Team), which was going in on Alpha Yellow Beach, the long strip of sand on the Baie de Pampelonne.
There was a heavy mist on August 15, so heavy it looked artificial. As I peered over the gunwale of the chugging LCI as we cruised steadily in towards Pampelonne Beach, I was reminded of that day at Nieuport when I had raised the false gas alarm. I wasn’t sure if that thick line of smog was mist or the dust raised by the bombers and the naval barrage. I suspect that whoever was at the helm was similarly inconvenienced because we landed somewhat off target, to the right of the beach in a small rocky shingled cove. I kept my eyes on Captain Loomis as he led the company off the front of the LCI into the water. It was eerily quiet for an invasion. No one was shooting at us.
I jumped in. The water was cool, thigh deep. I wore an olive-drab combat uniform, webbing with a water bottle attached and a tin helmet. I had painted PRESS across the front of this in three-inch-high white letters. A huge, envelope-sized Stars and Stripes had been badly stitched onto my left sleeve. I held aloft the pack containing my camera, film and rations. As I waded ashore I sensed the water was strangely viscous and unyielding against my thighs. I looked down. Dead fish. Inches thick. Red mullet, gray mullet, monkfish, whitebait, thousands of what looked like sardines, formed a thick piscatorial crust on the water. I sloshed out of the water and clambered across the rocks, following a furious Loomis to where we should have landed. Loomis was a young man, ludicrously proud of his role as a leader of men. He had a snub nose and soft fleshy lips, which made him look oddly effeminate and sat oddly with the constant martial frown that knitted his brows.
Along the length of the cracked, smoking beach to our left we could see the other LCIs depositing their men among the mess of tangled metal anti-invasion fortifications placed just above the tide mark. Now, from somewhere distant I could hear the pop-pop of small-arms fire. Loomis assembled his company and waited for the engineers with their mine detectors to lead us off the beaches. I wandered off through a gap in a screen of umbrella pines to urinate. The cold water had stimulated my bladder and now that the fear of opposed landings seemed groundless I had to relieve myself.
Beyond the pines was a clear patch of sand and some old yellow beach cabanas, rather knocked about by the preinvasion barrage. A sign read TAHITI PLAGE. I pissed up against this and was just buttoning up my fly when a handsome man in a beret, white shirt and blue shorts emerged from behind one of the cabanas. He carried a German submachine gun.
“Hey-oh, Américain,” he said. “What’s new?”
He shook me by the hand and told me in French that his name was Luc, that he was with the resistance and he was going to guide us to St.-Tropez. Then I heard Loomis shouting.
“Todd! Where the fuck are you?”
I led Luc back through the pines to Loomis. He was enraged.
“There’s fuckin’ mines everywhere, asswipe!” he shouted at me.
Luc shook his hand and said, “What’s new?”
Later I took a photograph of Luc, the cabanas and the TAHITI PLAGE sign. I liked to think that I had personally liberated this tranquil bathing beach from the German Army.
Eventually, after taped pathways had been marked through the minefields, the 17th RCT left the beachhead and moved across the scrub and pine copses of the St.-Tropez Peninsula in the direction of the town. The day became very hot. Overhead a Piper Cub spotter plane buzzed annoyingly. By ten-fifteen all firing seemed to have died away. In the woods the air was shrill with the sound of cicadas. From time to time a break in the trees or a rise in the ground afforded a view of the Gulf of St.-Tropez with the Monts des Maures in the background. In the bay sat the vast fleet, the still gray ships with the sun dancing prettily off the silver barrage balloons tethered above them. The rumble of artillery duels came across the gulf from Fréjus and Ste.-Maxime. Thin clouds of smoke rose into the air from burning buildings. I thought that it may not have been the most exciting invasion of the war, but it was certainly the most agreeable. Perhaps I had been lucky after all.
I had never got to London, you see. At the offices of the North American News Association in New York I had requested that I be sent to Normandy. I was initially dismayed when I found that I was instructed to proceed to Ajaccio, Corsica, via Casablanca and Palermo to join the U.S. Seventh Army. I traveled there on a boat filled with dynamite accompani
ed by two other NANA journalists, Sam M. Goodforth—so his card informed me—chief reporter of the Fort Worth Bugle, and Elmore Pico from the Hearst newspaper chain. Pico, thin and neurotic, later died on the beach at St.-Raphaël. Camel Force, to which he was assigned, saw the fiercest fighting of Operation Dragoon. Pico told me why we were going to Corsica.
“Because we don’t write for friggin’ Life, or Collier’s or McCall’s. We’re not famous; we’re not fuckin’ novelists. We don’t have important friends. All the big guys get to go to Normandy. They go by air. Us schmucks wind up in stinkin’ Corsica!”
He moaned all the way to Casablanca, where he caught dysentery. Goodforth and I reached Corsica in July. Pico caught up with us at the beginning of August. I filed reports for the Dusenberry papers regularly from Casablanca and Salerno, but later I learned they had all been spiked as too boring.
My disappointment over being assigned to the Mediterranean theater was short-lived. As I had hoped, my new job provided me with the peace of mind I had been seeking. It was enough to wear a uniform, to own a tin helmet again. I felt, in a strange way, that the step I had taken had the effect of voluntarily submitting myself to the contingencies of the universe once more. I had stopped trying to steer a course; I was content to be carried by the current. Even dark embittered Pico with his relentless bitching did not irritate me unduly.
By midafternoon of August 15, St.-Tropez was cleared of Germans, most of whom had either fled or surrendered. I stood in the ruined port with Luc and a rather attractive girl called Nadine wearing a revolver in her belt, and watched the prisoners being assembled ready to be marched off to the beach. In front of us was a large group of about 120 men. They were in Wehrmacht uniforms but they looked more Arabic than German. I asked Nadine who they were.
“From the Ost Legion,” she said. “Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia. They don’t even speak German.”
“We’ve got plenty Poles here too,” Luc said. He offered me a cigarette, a French one. I lit it and the sour tobacco reminded me suddenly of Annecy and the first days of my affair with Doon. All at once I was very happy to be back in France, in Europe. We went to a bar and drank pastis. Luc and Nadine were intrigued to learn I was a film director. We took our drinks and sat outside. The bar was in one of the narrow streets back from the port. We sat in shade but the late-afternoon sun burned strongly on the faded-pink, tiled roofs of the buildings. I took big gulps at the aniseed liquor. Nadine had thick curly hair held back from her face with tortoiseshell clips. She was dark-skinned and wore a blue-and-white print dress with neat canvas shoes on her feet. I wondered if she and Luc were lovers. I felt suddenly very sexually attracted towards her, perhaps because she had a gun. I looked at her hand that held her cigarette. Her nails were short and dirty. The way she was sitting caused her right breast to bulge gently over the butt of the revolver thrust in her belt. I at once saw these images as if they were projected on a cinema screen. Her dark mobile face as she pouted skepticism to some point Luc had raised. The careless way she drew on her cigarette; how she raised her chin and kept her eyes fixed on Luc to blow smoke sideways. The pale-yellow paper of the cigarette. The pale-yellow drink. Her breast. The gun. Just for a second or two—the slightest movement of the camera—so much hinted, so much implicit. I remembered Hamish’s friend Kurt, and what he had said to me. I knew then that The Confessions was not over.